Indeed, Mab was for me the least exotic of the book’s offerings. Like all of Block’s books, it’s set in a version of Los Angeles that teems with a magic far beyond the flapping of fairy wings. Like most of Block’s books, the story tilts on the axis of a central trauma revisiting it as an adult, my stomach lurched immediately the first time Barbie’s mother leaves her eleven-year-old daughter alone with a famous photographer, who beguiles and manipulates her before committing a violation that sends her running from his studio.

I Was A Teenage Fairy is the story of Barbie Marks, a young California model, and Mab, a tiny, green-skinned fairy (although she hates that word), who may or may not exist (although she would sniff most haughtily at you for doubting her). But I couldn’t have picked better: to say I was enraptured would be to understate how fully, how eagerly I fell into the spell. Knowing the kind of reader I was, it’s strange to me that I thought two books would be enough for a week on the road. The front cover showed a surly blue girl with wings, and the back cover called it “a potent brew of magic and transformation.” I didn’t think I was craving transformation, but I must have been a little ready for it - because when I, an unusually fastidious child when it came to monitoring the appropriateness of my own reading material, came across the word sex on the second page, I didn’t close the book flushed with shame. I thought the title was funny: I Was A Teenage Fairy, a winking nod to cliche filled in with an implication of magic. A chance encounter in a bookstore, when I wasn’t looking for anything special I just wanted something light to accompany my assigned summer reading on a family vacation. Like all the best love stories - at least all the love stories I spun for myself during the long waiting years - it began with a dose of kismet.

This time, we asked : What’s a book that made you fall in love? Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.

The hanged man by francesca lia block